Speaker 1 0:02

Welcome to this week's edition of the Dan Rayburn podcast, the show that curates the streaming media industry news that matters most, unvarnished, unscripted and providing you with the factual data you need to know, without any of the hype, the Pulse of the streaming media industry.

Speaker 2 0:24

Welcome to the Dan Rayburn Podcast. I'm Dan Rayburn, along with co-host Mark Dongan, for another week full of news. As always, we've got earning results here from WBD, fubo, paramount, also sports news, a lot of sports news, quick little hits here and there. Sports are us, it's always sports, something related as it will be forever going forward in this industry. Sports are us, it's always sports, something related as it will be forever going forward in this industry, which is good.

Speaker 2 0:48

But we had some good numbers this week, mark, which is good. So let's roll into some of these numbers. Let's start with Fubo. So Fubo had Q4 on full year 2024 earnings. Q4 revenue is $443.3 million, so revenue is up 8.1 year over year. They lost $40.9 million in the quarter. So there's a lot of numbers we could go through here, but let's just go through like the key numbers that listeners need to know. So for full year 2024, fubo had just under $1.6 billion in revenue, but the key number to look at here is they had $177.7 million net loss. That's a lot, but their net loss in 2023 was $293 million, so they've improved that by over $100 million year over year, so that is very good.

Speaker 3 1:38

Yeah, that's moving in the right direction.

Speaker 2 1:40

Yes, yes, the business is getting there. In terms of free cash flow. They added 63,000 subs in Q4. So they ended the year in North America with 1.67 million subs, arpu of $87.90. That's up $1.25 year over year. Now what they call ROW rest of world they had 362,000 subs, which was down almost 11%. So you add in North America, rest of the world, they have just over 2 million subs. Ad revenue for 2024 of the total amount of almost 1.6 billion ad revenue is 114 million. So just look at that number. There Ad revenue is still not even 10%.

Speaker 3 2:24

Yeah.

Speaker 2 2:25

A lot of room for growth there. They did say interesting ad categories that saw the most growth last year were political no surprise, yeah, no surprise. Retail, e-commerce, health services, home and garden technology and automotive. Interesting yeah, in 2024, total North American viewership was over 1.7 billion hours. Uh, also, they did say that fubo sports, which is the company's owned and operated fast channel, uh, it closed full year 2024 as profitable for the first time. So just their channel, uh, and then also, final number here is at the end of 2024, fugo had 167.6 million cash cash equivalents, so balance sheet getting much, much better here.

Speaker 2 3:16

We did not get any update on the deal with disney. That still has not passed regulation in terms of regulators, so I don't expect we'll get much there until that actually passes. Hopefully it does pass. But Fubo CEO made it clear that their intent is to keep offering Fubo and Hulu plus live TV as a separate service. They are going to have a new sports bundle, broadcast bundle, but it won't come out, likely until the next quarter and they gave out no pricing on that. So let's see what happens with disney. It still has to clear regulatory reviews, so we have to wait to hear about that also.

Speaker 2 3:58

It's interesting mark for them to talk about their packaging strategy and it said they're going to be more stringent when it comes to carriage agreements. So they are willing to walk away from deals where they say will increase prices for consumers. So we most recently saw that with their decision not to renew an agreement with Televisa Univision, so that had Spanish language programming. So they dropped that in December. But on the call the CEO said quote based on the significant rate increases, univision demanded costs that would have been passed on to our subscriber Subscribers. I should say so. Like any business, they have to make a decision. What is the content worth? What can we license it for? What percentage of our users want it and how does that tie into our business? Now, this is important and Fubo should get credit for this, because that was stripped out of the package.

Speaker 2 4:48

They lowered the price of its spanish uh, spanish lang latino plan by 55 percent wow, right so when have we seen content removed, yeah, from your streaming service and they lower the price and the price is reflected.

Speaker 3 5:04

Usually there's a price hike. You're like wait, I'm getting less.

Speaker 2 5:08

So you know, shout out to Fubo.

Speaker 3 5:11

Yeah.

Speaker 2 5:12

You remove content, especially if it's important to that particular demographic or audience, they should get a price reduction.

Speaker 1 5:19

That's what they did, yeah.

Speaker 2 5:21

So that's really good to see. Let's jump into Max. So that's that's really good to see, let's jump into max. So WBD, at earnings max gained 6.4 million subs. It ended the year with 117 million globally. The company said max is on track to have, quote, at least 150 million subscribers by the end of 2026. So still, you know what um one, what one, two, um, I gotta do math here. Seven quarters, yeah, still, uh. Wbd posted a quarterly profit of its d2c business 409 million q4. So that's that's definitely good, uh, compared to a55 million year ago loss, now, in full 2024, wbd's direct-to-consumer business turned a profit of $677 million. So that is great to see. Now, wbd overall reported a full-year 2024 loss of $11.3 billion. But that number is thrown off because $7.5 billion of that is pre-tax, acquisition related amortization of intangibles, restructuring expenses. And then, remember, $9.1 billion was non-cash goodwill impairment charge and they wrote down the value of their networks. Yeah, that's when they wrote it down. So that's a that's an odd, obviously, year.

Speaker 1 6:46

They don't do that every year.

Speaker 2 6:47

Uh, but the DTC business, you know, having a 677 million profit for the full year 2024, that is a good thing.

Speaker 3 6:58

Yeah, it was only, uh, not even two years ago, right, dan, that they were burning like a quarter about $600 million, I don't remember how much they were burning per quarter.

Speaker 2 7:11

I don't want to throw a number out, but it was a lot.

Speaker 3 7:14

We'll have to go look it up, but it was a lot, so an amazing improvement. Yes, and the fundamentals, it was a lot Now, keep in mind, just again the way Disney, the fundamentals.

Speaker 2 7:21

It was a lot. Now keep in mind just again the way Disney, comcast, wbd, paramount. Some of these folks talk profit. They use different terms. Just remember that as well. They're not always 100% apples to apples. Some add in additional costs that others don't. So important to remember that. Also, this was news that they released just before earnings. They announced that they're going to keep its live sports and news content available at no additional cost to standard and premium tier subscribers. It's not going to be on the lower tier, but the BR Sports and CNN Max packages. They're no longer available on the basic with ads tier and CNN Max packages. They're no longer available on the basic with ads tier. When it originally launched, you know, they said it was going to be something where they were going to charge more. But WBD said quote that path will not be pursued for now.

Speaker 3 8:19

You raise this as a. I wonder when they're going to start charging.

Speaker 2 8:24

Well, yeah, the end of last year. I think I remember you making a comment.

Speaker 2 8:31

Yes, and there's some background information there in terms of that I had, that I couldn't talk to in terms of what was going on and what it was going to go into and when and package and all that. But bottom line is the news is now out, so this is more content for a larger portion, larger portion of users. Yeah, yes, now I saw some people writing that like, okay, w wbd is like saying, screw you to basic with ads, tier member and this, and that it's like listen, guys, it's, it's an ad tier okay it's.

Speaker 2 8:58

This is premium sports yeah so if they care about sports that much, they can pay a little bit more every month to get it that's right, let's go to WBD. So WBD, that is one that had earnings, and sorry, we just covered WBD. It's been a long day let's go to Paramount so Paramount?

Speaker 2 9:24

I don't even know where I have this. Let's go, let's go. Let's go to paramount. How about paramount? So, uh, paramount, I don't even know where I have this. There. It is on the list, so okay. So paramount added 5.6 million paramount plus subs in q4. They ended the year with 77.5 million paramount plus subs. Their ddc revenue in 2024 was up 13 percent year over year, but they had a loss. Based on OIBDA, they had a loss of $497 million. So you can see the big difference there between WBD and Paramount as far as their DTC, business and profitability. Paramount did say they expect the Skydance transactions to close in the first half of 2025. That's good to see. They also said that they expect Paramount Plus will achieve full year domestic profitability for 2025. So that's where the vast majority of their subscribers are. So that would be great for the business.

Speaker 2 10:21

So, the key takeaway here is every time we have earnings from these companies offering DTC services, let's call it over the last two years that Mark and I have been talking about earnings every quarter. The numbers continue to get better every quarter. That's because companies have cut people, they've cut costs, they've been more disciplined in the content spend. It's not a silver bullet to fix this, but they're doing what they need to to get to the point of where these services become profitable. Not only become profitable, but stay profitable yeah that's the key.

Speaker 2 10:58

one or two quarters doesn't work, so they're all making really good progress.

Speaker 3 11:03

So interesting to watch the next four quarters where that business is at for Paramount service provider with a streaming, you know, type, type offer in the market and it's pretty universal. Some are a little ahead of others, some, you know, and again, there's strategy too, right. So you know it's also possible if there's some people who are, you know, still spending more and still losing money, you know there's probably some strategy behind that. But you know, possibly I mean, we don't necessarily know, but, um, I think this is important, it's very important, yeah.

Speaker 2 11:53

There's definitely a strategy behind it. It's different international. So WBD talked a lot about their international.

Speaker 3 11:58

Exactly, exactly, and where someone is in there in kind of the growth curve of the international business versus, you know, north America, um, that also could mean that they've got to spend ahead of revenues, or licensing content, getting you know marketing.

Speaker 2 12:16

International is huge.

Speaker 3 12:17

And just to tie into that.

Speaker 2 12:18

Since we're bringing up international at the NAB show streaming summit, I'm going to sit with the CEO of Sky Showtime.

Speaker 3 12:25

Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 2 12:28

The title of our talk and discussion is why Europe is the Next Frontier in Streaming. Because growth is coming from international markets.

Speaker 3 12:34

Yeah.

Speaker 2 12:34

We all know that. So interesting to see how much WBD talked about that with rolling out. Max Max is also, they announced coming to Australia soon. I forget the date. International's where it's at for sure.

Speaker 2 12:47

Let's go into echo stars uh earnings. So they lost 253 000 pay tv customers, which includes sling tv. Sling tv lost 50 000 of that 253. Sling tv ended full year fiscal 2024 with 2.09 million subscribers almost 2.1 million Full year 2024. Revenue from the pay TV segment for Echo Star was down 8% over a year. No shocker there. And just for comparison, sling TV has been in the market for nine years now. Has never surpassed more than 2.6 million subscribers at its peak pretty interesting number. Yeah, let's jump into all right now we're going to get into some some lawsuit things and some some arguments here between some big companies. So LFP, which is the French Professional Football League, lfp and DAZN settled a lawsuit. So very interesting. Last month LFP sued DAZN in an emergency filing because DAZN refused to make its 35 million pound February payment for the League One broadcasting rates. I was like why would you not pay? Well, the zone claimed that LFP had not adhered to their contract and they accused them of not allocating sufficient resources to combat piracy, which we're going to talk about later.

Speaker 3 14:16

Yeah.

Speaker 2 14:18

And also said they you know there's a lack of participation and collaboration from certain clubs in regards to providing content. Not quite sure what that means, but it was reported that DAZN was also said to be displeased, that they reported half a million subscribers for their League One package and that the number DAZN needs to break even is three times that at 1.5 million. So Mark and I are recording this. On Friday, February 28th, after the markets closed and a court verdict was expected today, but before it was delivered, DAZN has settled the debt. They paid the full amount. Lfp came out and said quote discussions are ongoing to resolve all outstanding issues between the LFP and DAZN. So it sounds like they're working it out. Yeah, but I thought it was interesting that we have a bunch of numbers here that were put out, because usually we don't get those numbers.

Speaker 3 15:17

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 15:19

So all comes down to you paid a certain amount for content and you need more subscribers because the cost you pay is content, and you need more subscribers because the cost you pay is high and you need to be able to monetize it and make money yeah back to monetization.

Speaker 2 15:32

Now. Separately, dazn announced today the creation of a new corporate division called DAZN basketball. They've put somebody in charge to head that up. The person heading it up previously served as the vice president of NBA Europe, middle East and Africa, as well as managing director for NBA Spain, so clearly they put somebody in charge.

Speaker 2 15:53

He knows basketball no other details on what they plan to do as of yet. That's all they've said. For now, let's go to ESPN. Espn is launching a new sports center show called SC Plus, but it's only available on Disney Plus, which is interesting. Now it's available weekday mornings at 9 am and Disney says the show will highlight today's top sports moments, stories, insights. But I found it interesting that they then said in the post that it's only going to be available on demand for 24 hours. I don't know why that is. I don't know. If they don't have the rights, Maybe they're showing sports clips and they don't have the rights, is my guess.

Speaker 2 16:37

But it will be available to all Disney Plus standalone subscribers, meaning you don't have to be subscribed to ESPN Plus to get it so interesting to see what that content looks like. The other thing is and I didn't get a reply back from from disney or espn is how long is this show?

Speaker 2 16:54

yeah, yeah, because what I want to know are are they recapping everything in 10 minutes and this is like a quick bite of information. Yeah, yeah, is it an hour? I don't know. So that is shoot. I didn't put the date in there. Uh, when was launching? But it's in the next few months. Let's go to direct TV. So, man, direct TV has been busy. These guys are. These guys are pumping out a lot of packages and a lot of content, and this one in particular is really interesting. So they announced all new packages, um, what they're calling mini packs and genre packs. So they have my Entertainment, my News, spanish Pack, sports Pack. Now the Sports Pack they already launched, but here's the one listeners should really listen to here. In terms of details, they launched a package called my Entertainment at $35 a month. It comes with 43 channels, but included with those channels are, like serious channels, a&e Network, bravo, discovery, food Network, fx, cnn, msnbc, fox News, history Channel, tlc and Disney Plus, hulu, bundle Basic and Max Basic with ads is coming as well, no additional cost.

Speaker 3 18:18

Wow $35.

Speaker 2 18:21

Wow, that's a deal, so that's pretty interesting.

Speaker 3 18:25

Yeah.

Speaker 2 18:27

And you can sign up now at DirecTV Stream. Soon you'll be able to sign up at DirecTV and through third-party partners. Yeah, but that's pretty incredible. For 35 a month now also. I asked and I was told no, this is, this is the pricing. I wondered, is that like okay, 35 a month introductory?

Speaker 3 18:45

but yes, yes, teaser, yeah, exactly. They said no. This is, this is the pricing price price.

Speaker 2 18:51

They didn't say we're not guaranteeing to raise the price over time, but it's $35 a month.

Speaker 3 18:56

Wow.

Speaker 2 18:57

So that's pretty amazing. Curious if we'll ever get from them subscriber numbers over time.

Speaker 3 19:03

Yeah.

Speaker 2 19:04

They also have a Spanish package. All kinds of ESPN, Fox, NetGeo, Telemundo, Univision. They're also going to add VIX Premium with ads at no cost. For the Spanish package they also have one called my Cinema. This is $10 a month. It includes Sony movies, Turner Classic movies, Great American Family I didn't know that was a channel.

Speaker 3 19:28

Okay.

Speaker 2 19:29

But some interesting packages here that you can pick and choose from. So that's the thing I love about this is they've just made it simple.

Speaker 2 19:36

Yeah, okay, but some interesting packages here that you can pick and choose from. So that's the thing I love about this is they've just made it simple. Yeah, still isn't a la carte. You can't pick only the channels you want, but at $35 a month, that's a package that a lot of people are going to like, and the fact it comes with streaming of Disney, hulu and Max, it's a sweet deal. Let's go to Amazon.

Speaker 2 19:58

So Amazon announced they're going to launch a live linear TV channel on April 17th exclusively for Prime Video members in Germany, and April 1st in Australia. Now there's some things we don't know. The content, they said, is going to be curated from their video library, prime's video library. It's going to include UEFA. Is that right? Yeah, uefa champion league matches for Germany viewers. They call that Wimbledon tennis in Germany and Austria, but what I still can't figure out is whether those games are live or that's on demand on a live, you know linear TV channel. Yeah, not sure, and it wasn't clear.

Speaker 2 20:38

This was from an interview that someone from Amazon did in a publication in Germany. You can see the link up on up on my LinkedIn post that I did about this. The only other thing we heard from Amazon that they talked about in the article was they said commercial breaks will be quote shorter and less frequent. So interesting, but we don't know by how much. This executive also talked about wanting to provide advertisers with more data so that they can actually compare Prime's viewing performance compared with traditional pay TV channels, so I thought that was kind of interesting. What information they're looking to share, we don't know. Now let's go into piracy here.

Speaker 3 21:24

Yes.

Speaker 2 21:24

This is going to get a little interesting here. So let's start with La Liga. So last week they said they successfully blocked illegal broadcasts from two websites and apps that were broadcasting their content live, and these services were using Cloudflare services to conceal activities alongside legitimate domains. And they said, together the two platforms had more than 400,000 unique monthly users in Spain. Now we're not surprised. Cloudflare's involved. They've been blocking and keeping sites like this, you know up and going with their services, you know for forever.

Speaker 2 22:10

But what was interesting is LaLiga highlighted how the IP blocking they did. It wasn't on a large scale basis. It targeted a series of specifically identified IPs that were hosting these, these pirated streams. So here's a company coming out and saying, hey, we, they. Now they had to use the courts to go against Cloudflare. But here's a company that's come out and said, okay, we're using the tools we have to block streaming and we've been successful at it to a degree. Now we don't know what percentage of those two sites make up of all the pirated streams in spain. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 22:46

But then we have another story this week of sky. So sky came out and criticized amazon for what they're saying is failing to do enough to tackle piracy, and sky is blaming amazon's fire tv stick because they say it makes up about half of a legal streaming of premier league football in the uk alone. So sky's coo said that piracy was costing the industry hundreds of millions of dollars and he he called an Amazon to work with them to crack down on illegal streaming. But what he's asking for doesn't make sense and apparently they don't really seem to understand how the fire TV stick works. Yeah, exactly, and they're not giving out enough information of what they claim they want Amazon to do but is not doing so.

Speaker 2 23:39

The key thing here is what Sky is saying is that if you this is a quote if you speak to friends and colleagues or you watch football, people will know that you can get jailbroken fire TV sticks, and colleagues or you watch football, people will know that you can get jailbroken fire TV sticks and you can access pirated services on fire sticks. Well, first of all, it's not jailbroken. Fire TV sticks are not jailbroken. They run on Android, and jailbroken means to remove restrictions. That's imposed by the manufacturer operator, and you do that to allow the installation of unauthorized software. That's not what Amazon allows with the Fire TV stick. It's on Android. You can sideload apps.

Speaker 3 24:25

Yeah.

Speaker 2 24:26

But the other thing they don't understand is Amazon is a hardware device. Let's take a service like Plex. Plex is a totally legitimate service. People set up Plex servers and then share it with others and they charge a fee for it every month. Well, how is Amazon supposed to stop that when it's coming from a legitimate app? They can't. And, by the way, you can also run Plex on your Roku on your Apple TV.

Speaker 1 24:52

Yeah, you can run it everywhere.

Speaker 2 24:56

Everywhere. Now let me make this really clear. Plex knows about this and they have an entire team. I'm not going to go into the details, but they have an entire team of people at Plex who do nothing but shut down Plex servers every day. If you're in any of the Reddit boards and others, tons of Plex servers have gotten shut down, starting really two years ago, and never came back and as a result, people moved to Jellyfin and Envy. So Plex has done a great job of stamping that out. But it's not dependent on the device. You can run that app anywhere. So Sky's under this impression that Amazon is allowing people to jailbreak a device, which they're not actually doing, and run all kinds of illegal software, which is not illegal because it's actually in the store. In many cases, a lot of them are in the store. Now, full transparency here. I have a whole bunch of devices running illegal stuff. I track this stuff nonstop. Yeah, so I have IPTV services. I've got all kinds of stuff running on different types of devices. It doesn't require you quote jailbreaking a device.

Speaker 2 25:58

No, no, no, no it's just not the way it works.

Speaker 1 26:01

Now.

Speaker 2 26:02

DAZN also happened to mention that currently, right now, piracy is quote almost a crisis for the sports industry and he's saying there's an argument to say that you can't get exclusive rights anymore because piracy is so bad. Really, I don't see anyone talking about like, oh man, we're not willing to pay for exclusive rights.

Speaker 3 26:22

Yeah, yeah it. It didn't stop Netflix, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 26:28

Now, final piece here. If you've listened to this podcast long enough, I've been complaining since well before the podcast, even on LinkedIn, that I buy so many Amazon Fire TV sticks every year because I give them out just so many people thank yous at shows, conferences, raffles, military members just all the time. I've bought hundreds of them that I can never buy more than like two or three at a time from Amazon. And when I try and buy more, like a week later, they're like, sorry, you've reached your limit, and then I have to wait and I got to wait. Now what's interesting here is Sky is saying Amazon is not doing enough to address where people are buying these devices in bulk. I would love to know what Sky is talking about, because if I go into Staples tomorrow, I can buy 10 or 20 Fire TV sticks. I can buy their entire inventory.

Speaker 3 27:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah exactly.

Speaker 2 27:20

So how does Sky expect Amazon to stop Target or well, it's not sold at Walmart or Sta or one of the office depot from buying Amazon Fire TV sticks? They're now going to impose like oh, by the way, staples, you can sell our product, but you can't sell more than two at a time.

Speaker 3 27:40

Yeah, it makes no sense yeah.

Speaker 2 27:43

Now, sky did say they're working with Premier League, you know, to tackle piracy, but then said quote Amazon has not been helpful enough in addressing the problem. What do you want them to do? Well, he told us. You know what he wants us to do Wants Amazon to lock down the device or impose controls and restrictions. So what does that mean? Don't know? Love to see what the details are of that. But now you're asking Amazon to lock down a device that people bought and then you're going to tell them what they can or can't add to the device from an app standpoint. That's just not how the world works. So interesting though that Sky is talking about this very, uh, publicly, very vocal, um and uh, you know, I just I don't think it's realistic in terms of what they're asking for. But hey, what do I know? I'd love to see an official proposal. Sure, are we going to get one? No, but if sky really wants to like elevate this to a higher level of discussion, put out a proposal of what you actually want Amazon doing. Be interesting to see.

Speaker 2 28:53

A couple more things here, mark, we'll wrap up here. So the first one is we know that Fox has announced that they're going to offer a DTC service and they now have a CEO. So Pete Dostad, who's previously CEO of Venue Sports, he's now the name CEO of the recently announced Fox DTC streaming platform, so he's going to assume oversight, the company says, of all aspects of the upcoming service. We don't know what the service is or when it's launching. There's been a couple of rumors on pricing. I've read everything between $15 and $25 a month. We don't know if that's true. That's a big spread as well, so not sure there what the pricing will be or launch. But now they have a CEO, so that's good. Another earnings thing here, a little bit different.

Speaker 2 29:44

Cdn 77 is a private company. Last year they allowed me to put out the revenue publicly, which was awesome. I wish more private companies had that attitude, showing just growth and what they're doing. So CDN 77, they grew to 175 million in revenue 2024, up from 145 in 2023. They say they're cash flow positive and have no debt. They say they're cashflow positive and have no debt. Also, all of their revenue comes from delivery. They're not like other CDNs doing security and compute. They also broke out which I love size of customer based on revenue. So they have thousands of customers, but they said more than 300 are enterprise and they define enterprise as a minimum ARR of $50,000. So great, we have a number there that helps. They also highlighted that during Egeo's bankruptcy auction they provided free services to select customers for a couple months, allowed them to bring traffic over so they could evaluate their next steps, and they said that approach allowed them to convert many of those customers into paying customers once they joined the network. So smart approach there, no surprise.

Speaker 3 30:52

I mean that's a very brilliant marketing hook. You have a market that needs your product. You know there's a transition. You say, hey, you know, we're happy to have you. Yeah, you target them selectively, yeah exactly you know, and then somebody gives it a shot.

Speaker 1 31:18

You feel?

Speaker 3 31:19

yeah, they, you know they like it. There's goodwill there. You know you definitely would fast track a sales conversation. So yeah, that was brilliant, yeah.

Speaker 2 31:28

Smart and also a small subset of customers. I won't go into how many that they shared, but a small subset. It's not shotgun approach. Let's give away services to a thousand customers.

Speaker 3 31:36

That's not smart yeah.

Speaker 2 31:39

So two other things here, mark, to wrap up. So interesting New York Times article today about Google. So earlier in the week, sergey from Google said the company could lead the industry in artificial general intelligence, which is basically described as when machines match or become smarter than humans. I hope that never works, but that's what it's called, is AGI artificial general intelligence. Now he says the way they could do this is that people should be in the office every day during the week. But he also said that quote 60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity for employees 60 hours a week and it shows how detached some of these folks are of reality in the market, because if you're working 60 hours a week in the office and that doesn't include your commuting time, yeah, exactly what else? You're working 60 hours a week at the result and suffering of what?

Speaker 2 32:40

that's right your health, your family, your relationships, your all of it I was gonna say or all of the above, all of it, unfortunately. And yet here to say or all of the above, all of it, unfortunately. And yet here's someone you know calling out in a memo like, well, if we could just get employees to work 60 hours a week, it's just. It's a sad state of affairs. When that's what you want, cause you want your company to be quicker to the market, to get to artificial general intelligence, okay, and that does what for the company?

Speaker 2 33:06

How does that help employees? So interesting that that's the approach. Now, this was specific to companies at Google. He sent this message to employees who work on Gemini, which is Google's lineup of AI modeling and apps yeah, but yeah, sweet spot is 60 hours a week in the office.

Speaker 3 33:31

So, hey, if you're in that Gemini group, that's what you're shouting for I'm sure the open AI recruiters are standing outside the front gate of. Google.

Speaker 2 33:43

That's just not healthy.

Speaker 2 33:45

I don't care how fast your company could grow as a result. You got to put people first. As I say, all the time you invest in people over ideas, you win. And then let's just wrap up here, mark, for anyone in New York City or who's going to be in New York City, on March 18th I'm throwing a streaming industry meetup. Thanks to sponsors Uplink, amagi, wowza and Bitmovin, they're covering the bar tab. Thanks to sponsors Uplink, amagi, wowza and Bitmovin, they're covering the bar tab. That's awesome. It's good for me, because sometimes that bar tab it can be quite expensive. Yeah, but if you look online you can see the details. It's 6 pm.

Speaker 2 34:27

It's a really nice bar in Midtown, lower Midtown, easy to get to, not all the way downtown on Wall Street, sort of right in the middle there. Um, so there's no rsvp required. Now, mark, I can't. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it's just disappointing the amount of people who don't read and can't follow instructions. Hey, my post on linkedin I'm sure you saw it was like four sentences yeah, no RSVP required. Yeah, you must bring ID.

Speaker 3 34:49

It's a bar after all, it's a bar Right.

Speaker 2 34:51

There's no coat. Check yeah, bring a business card.

Speaker 3 34:53

Yeah.

Speaker 2 34:55

I've gotten more than two dozen emails of how do I get a ticket? Where do I RSVP? How do I put my name at the door? Are you ready for this? I I got two emails now asking how they buy a VIP ticket. Oh Well, it's free and I don't know what a. Vip ticket is Like what are you talking about?

Speaker 3 35:15

Dan, dan, you need to set a table aside. Just have four chairs, just four chairs. Put a sign VIP, just a sign VIP. Charge them 50 bucks, you know, per seat, $10,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 35:28

So it's just, you know, you're just trying to get the industry together and people are sending emails. Now I got multiple emails of saying why do I have to bring id I if you live on planet earth? Yeah, you know, in america let's just call it you have to be 21 to drink yeah barters check id many times.

Speaker 3 35:46

No matter how old you are, it times no matter how old you are.

Speaker 2 35:48

It doesn't matter how old you are. Have you ever been to a bar in America? Like, why do you have to bring ID? And then I had a few people argue with me about business cards. Well, I don't have a business card. Nobody uses those anymore. Like QR code. Nobody wants to put your QR card in their phone. They've never even met you before and they're going to fill their phone with a bunch of people they don't know. Yeah, yeah yeah that's not real. Get a business card.

Speaker 2 36:09

Moocom m-o-o exactly some of the best cards around yeah, $22 for 50 cards yeah, yeah but I know people aren't going to show up with the cards. I'm going to have to have index cards there. People write their name down on, so who knows what's going to happen. But the good news is a lot of people roll through. I haven't done these in a while.

Speaker 3 36:30

Thanks to covid what's the turnout on average or what so? What has it been?

Speaker 2 36:35

well pre-covid which I don't know how much that changes things yeah in a two to two and a half hour window, depending on the night. I did it okay. Was it too cold? Was it too hot?

Speaker 1 36:45

sometimes, yeah, there's a rooftop right, that's there's variables anywhere between 150 to 250.

Speaker 2 36:52

Really, yeah, attendees come by now. Not everyone stays for two hours no, of course not, but an hour after it started, but rolling through, yeah, 200, 250, yeah, incredible. And it's all from the industry. Yeah, it's, it's not um other industries there now. It's finance people, it's vcs, it's wall street, it's content owners, it's broadcasters, it's vendors, it's sports leagues, it's, it's a nice mix of everything. Yeah, so check it out online. If you can't find it, just email me, hit me up on linkedin. Um, but should be. Should be a good time. You know the market streaming summit five weeks away. By the time, people were listening to this we added tiktok.

Speaker 2 37:32

We added some really great speakers two speakers from wbd talking about live streaming, one about cloud infrastructure and building out. So go to nabstreamingsummitcom. I would say that 90 of the program is now up. There's still a lot of speakers to drop in that are confirmed and I'm waiting for their headshot or bio, but it is wrapping up really nicely. Super excited Ticket sales at this time, right now, five weeks out, are double what they were last year. We did find that more than half of the people last year bought their ticket about four weeks or less. Not surprising.

Speaker 3 38:08

Am I going?

Speaker 2 38:09

Am I not? I'm not sure Exactly, but it's going to be great. So if you have any questions about that, if you still need a discount code, reach out to me at any time. What do we have next week, mark? Actually, we don't have any earnings. No earnings.

Speaker 3 38:22

Earnings season is over for a short period of time, two and a half months. Yeah, yeah, maybe less than that. Actually less, yeah, because Netflix is always before everybody.

Speaker 2 38:31

Yep, yep, but uh, that's it, mark, and I appreciate your time. Have a safe week. You need anything? Reach out to us, we're always around.

Speaker 1 38:41

Thanks very much. If you enjoyed the show, send it to a friend. Have questions for Dan or Mark, connect with them on LinkedIn at any time and be sure to check out Dan's blog at streamingmediablogcom.